In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the origins of observability and why you need it. In this blog (Part 2), we will cover exactly what observability is, what it isn’t, and how to get started. Before we can dive into how to approach observability, let’s get one thing clear: You can’t buy a one-size-fits-all observability solution.

We’ve got a lot of OpenTelemetry-flavored honey to send your way, ranging from OpenTelemetry SDK distribution updates to protocol support. We now support OpenTelemetry logs, released a new SDK distribution for OpenTelemetry Go, and have some updates around OpenTelemetry + Honeycomb to share. Let’s see what all the buzz is about this time! 🐝🐝

At VMware, we are on a mission to build a comprehensive, extensible, and intelligent monitoring and observability platform to help businesses run seamlessly. Over the past few years, we have evolved our platform to deliver invaluable end-to-end observability across applications and infrastructure.

With its market size reaching more than $2 billion in 2020, you’d think that a universal definition of the term observability would have emerged by now. But it turns out that a clear definition of a term or industry isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for the rapid growth of its market size — just ask everyone at your next dinner party to define blockchain for you and see how many different answers you get!

Someone once described dashboards to me as “expensive TV for software engineers.” At first, I stood there quietly shocked—dashboards had informed many root cause analyses (RCAs) in my life as a developer.

Logs are key to monitoring the performance of your applications. Kubernetes offers a command line tool for interacting with the control plane of a Kubernetes cluster called Kubectl. This tool allows debugging, monitoring, and, most importantly, logging capabilities. There are many great tools for SREs. However, Kubernetes supports Site Reliability Engineering principles through its capacity to standardize the definition, architecture, and orchestration of containerized applications.